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Ask HN: What's so special about HN? Why do you hang out here?
Just curious... why not somewhere else? It's the only community with smart people I know. Are there any others?
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoMostly-polite interaction on the content of ideas rather than personal attacks. High signal-to-noise ratio. A fair number of thought-provoking posts from a lot of different angles.
- nonotmeplease 11y agoWhy is so hard to build a similar community somewhere else? (I don't plan to but...) Suppose I wanted to build a community like HN, how do I proceed?
- DrScump 11y agoWhat do you want in a community that doesn't already exist somewhere?
- yen223 11y agoIt's the old chicken-and-egg problem: you build a community by attracting new users, but new users will join only if there's already a good community. It's hard to get a community started.
- insoluble 11y agoStrong moderation with clearly defined goals and rules could go a long way, granted you had the resources to back it up long enough for it to become self-sufficient. Stack Exchange has some categories with strong moderation and rules. The problem with SE, in my opinion, is that posting there feels literally like working without being paid. There's almost no fun in posting answers on SE, while there is still a bit of fun posting on HN.
- stephenr 11y agoThere is also https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs, and I like their approach more (it's not inherently related to venture capital backed startups, and its much more transparent with the community (i.e. the concept of effectively hiding unpopular opinions does not exist there) Unfortunately, it's also nowhere near as active - possibly because it works on invites and its often hard to find someone who will invite others. Having said that, if anyone wants an invite, please reply here (or see my profile to email me, please include your HN username if you do that) and I'll shoot you an invite.
- squiguy7 11y agoI like how close-knit lobsters is. I feel like I can follow discussions much easier as opposed to on HN. And yes, the community being transparent is nice because it feels like the site is owned by everyone.
- ukz 11y agoLobsters' tagging/filtering feature is also neat. Beside that, other thing I find lacking in HN is mobile experience, sure it's got optimized lately but I accidentally hit upvote sometimes.
- dvdcxn 11y agoWould love an invite if you still have any, seems like a nice place to spend my lunch hour.
- fisk 11y agoI can see it's a hard problem for lobste.rs to keep the level of discourse high if they let in everyone, but then, yeah, it generally sucks if you would like to add to a conversation and their attitude is "Well, get an invite from one of your friends of course". Because of course I'd be friends with one of the exceedingly modest number of people who have accounts there. It probably seems like a good marketing attitude to them to assume hugeness or the destiny of hugeness, but attitude puts me off somewhat. But, yes, what you said about not being connected with the whole startup thing which definely draws a certain amount of...amorality to HN.
- saywahat 11y agoSimple ui. No crap to cut through.
- frou_dh 11y agoLow-effort 'humour' comments get downvoted here! Compare to much of reddit, which is to wade through hoards of comedy-slugs attempting to riff off each other.
- mwhuang2 11y agoIt's like a newspaper for techies. The community is also polite and intellectual, and I feel more comfortable here than on other sites.
- mod 11y agoComments, that's 95% of why I'm here. I could find the same stories elsewhere with no (or worse) discussion.
- Nicholas_C 11y agoGood discussion. I don't know anything about a many posts here (not a programmer by trade, and barely a hobbyist) and I don't work in startups. But there are a lot of interesting things that are posted here and the intelligent discussion keeps me coming back.